I highly doubt that a 1500 hour minimum will so much for overall safety. For one, the airlines will not be hiring people with less than that for a while anyways in the current job market. What would increase safety would be a much better screening process and higher training standards. Just for a moment compare any mainline yearly training to any regionals yearly training. It is night and day. Bottom line is that safety costs money. Regionals are in the business or running as lean as possible, so the first thing that gets the ax is any training over what is specifically required by law.

To increase safety you need more than a min hour requirement. Any idiot can fly around for 1500 hours, but that doesn't make them safe. The interviews need to be hard, and intellectually challenging. Forcing people to make tough decisions using a knowledge base that they will be able to rely upon on the line if hired.

I would rather see the government put minimums of hours of yearly training for the airlines. FO's should hit the SIM every 6 months, just like the CA's. We should all have a training schedule that looks more like the Legacy airlines. Including a couple days of ground school that focus on not only CRM, security, FOQA and regs., but also a number of systems. The SIM should be more robust as well, in addition to the standard single engine approachs and V1 cuts, you should see some scenarios that force a crew to make tough decisions all the way to a final outcome and learn from that expierence.

Force people to either buck up, be highly trained professionals or hit the streets.